JOSEPH HONE – The Valley of the Fox. St. Martin’s Press, US, hardcover, 1984. Reprint paperback: Collier, US, 1989. First edition: Secker & Warburg, UK, hardcover, 1982.

   Joseph Hone has written some fine espionage novels — The Oxford Gambit, The Sixth Directorate and The Private Sector — so The Valley of the Fox comes as a surprise.

   Peter Marlow, retired spy featured in the earlier Hone books, marries a beautiful but mysterious widow named Laura whose anthropologist husband was killed in Africa. Laura has a daughter named Clare who doctors have pronounced “autistic” but who holds many surprises.

   Marlow’s life is idyllic until a masked man enters his house and kills Laura and attempts to kill Peter. Marlow, finding out he’s being framed fqr his wife’s murder, flees into the surrounding English countryside. There he meets a bizarre woman named Alice who helps him rescue Clare from the nearby hospital and allows Peter and Clare the run of her strange estate.

   The plot continues to twist and turn as Marlow investigates his dead wife’s past and the deadly secrets Clare holds. This is not an espionage novel in the conventional sense but Hone manages to pull off an off-beat novel about a retired spy in an incredible plot.

   Recommended!

   Bibliography [Taken from the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin.]

HONE, JOSEPH. 1937– .
       The Private Sector (n.) H. Hamilton 1971. Peter Marlow.
       The Sixth Directorate (n.) Secker 1975. Peter Marlow.
       The Paris Trap (n.) Secker 1977

       The Flowers of the Forest (n.) Secker 1980. US title: The Oxford Gambit. Peter Marlow.

       The Valley of the Fox (n.) Secker 1982. Peter Marlow.